Congratulations to 8th grader Rahul Nagvekar, who was just named the 2012 National Geographic Bee champion! Rahul is 14 years old and from Missouri City, Texas. It’s a good thing he has a passion for traveling, as this year’s winner receives a trip to the Galapagos Islands, in addition to a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society and a $25,000 college scholarship. To get here today, Rahul has answered more than 300 geography-related questions since the Bee started at Quail Valley Middle School last fall.

This year, over four million students around the United States participated in the National Geographic Bee. Participants in the qualifying rounds were asked a variety of questions, ranging from locations of carnivorous plants, spider monkeys, natural disasters, soil types, language dialects, labor reforms, and glaciers. Participants must have a vast amount of knowledge in order to successfully answer questions on such diverse topics.

Physical, human, and cultural geography encompasses much of what takes place on our planet. These nine to fourteen year olds have a wealth of knowledge about the world that extends way beyond their years. The last question of this year’s final was: “Name the Bavarian City on the Danube River that was the legislative seat for the Holy Roman Empire from 1663-1806.” The winning answer is, of course, Regensburg, in Bavaria, Germany.

Google is once again proud to sponsor the National Geographic Bee. This contest highlights the importance of being geographically literate, a skill that is vital for all students. We are all explorers and must invest in understanding the world around us. Technology, like Google Earth, allows us to virtually visit any place on the planet so we can make those connections between people and their environment.

You can watch the 2012 National Geographic Bee tonight, Thursday, May 24th at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo WILD. It will also air later on public broadcasting stations.

That’s right. Summer interns are already descending upon our North America offices. This year we are welcoming a class of over 1,000 technical interns in Mountain View, New York, Seattle/Kirkland, and Cambridge just to name a few. As always, they are a mix of undergrad and graduate students working on some of our most critical projects and coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and universities.

We strive to deliver a world class internship experience where our technical interns are key players in our daily innovation. They have the opportunity to make big contributions as Software Engineers, Product Managers, User Experience Researchers, and in many other roles. Stay tuned for this year’s Diary of a Summer Intern series to hear straight from the source what it’s really like to intern at Google.

At Google, our goal is to create a diverse workplace that represents our users. We work in teams to do cool stuff that matters and know you do too. As a member of the Veteran community, you have demonstrated a commitment to the core values of impact and collaboration. We want to celebrate this commitment by giving you an opportunity to refine, build, and practice these skills at Google.

Up to 20 participants will be selected to attend an all-expense-paid Summit at Google’s Mountain View office from July 16th-July 17th. The inaugural Google Student Veterans Summit will include a professional development curriculum geared towards your transition into the workplace. Through networking opportunities with Google’s Veteran community and exposure to the business side of a technology company, you will gain access to Google’s culture of impact and collaboration.
Selection Process

To apply, students must:

Be currently enrolled in a 4-year BA/BS program, in any major, at a university in the United States OR matriculate into a United States MBA Program in the Fall of 2012.

Must have served in one of the following United States Military Services: Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, or Navy.

Today we’re featuring Sabrina Williams, a Software Engineer in Test who joined Google in August 2011. Software Engineers in Test undertake a broad range of challenges on a daily basis, designing and building intelligent systems that can explore various use cases and scenarios for distributed computing infrastructure. Read on to learn more about Sabrina’s path to Google and what she works on now that she’s here!

Tell us about yourself and how you got to Google.
I grew up in rural Prunedale, Calif. and went to Stanford where I double-majored in philosophy and computer science. After college I spent six years as a software engineer at HP, working primarily on printer drivers. I began focusing on testing my last two years there—reading books, looking up information and prototyping test tools in my own time. By the time I left, I’d started a project for an automated test framework that most of our lab used.

I applied for a software engineering role at Google four years ago and didn’t do well in my interviews. Thankfully, a Google recruiter called last year and set me up for software engineer (SWE) interviews again. After a day of talking about testing and mocking for every design question I answered, I was told that there were opportunities for me in SWE and SET. I ended up choosing the SET role after speaking with the SET hiring manager. He said two things that convinced me. First, SETs spend as much time coding as SWEs, and I wanted a role where I could write code. Second, the SETs job is to creatively solve testing problems, which sounded more interesting to me than writing features for a product. This seemed like a really unique and appealing opportunity, so I took it!

So what exactly do SETs do?
SETs are SWEs who are really into testing. We help SWEs design and refactor their code so that it is more testable. We work with test engineers (TEs) to figure out how to automate difficult test cases. We also write harnesses, frameworks and tools to make test automation possible. SETs tend to have the best understanding of how everything plays together (production code, manual tests, automated tests, tools, etc.) and we have to make that information accessible to everyone on the team.

What project do you work on?
I work on the Google Cloud Print team. Our goal is to make it possible to print anywhere from any device. You can use Google Cloud Print to connect home and work printers to the web so that you (and anyone you share your printers with) can access them from your phone, tablet, Chromebook, PC or any other supported web-connected device.

What advice would you give to aspiring SETs?
First, for computer science majors in general: if there’s any other field about which you are passionate, at least minor in it. CS is wonderfully chameleonic in that it can be applied to anything. So if, for example, you love art history, minor in art and you can write software to help restore images of old paintings.

For aspiring SETs, challenge yourself to write tests for all of the code you write for school. If you can get an internship where you have access to a real-world code base, study how that company approaches testing their code. If it’s well-tested, see how they did it. If it’s not well-tested, think about how you would test it. I don’t (personally) know of a CS program that has even a full course based on testing, so you’ll have to teach yourself. Start by looking up buzzwords like “unit test” and “test-driven development.” Look up the different types of tests (unit, integration, component, system, etc.). Find a code coverage tool (if a free/cheap one is available for your language of choice) and see how well you’re covering your code with your tests. Write a tool that will run all of your tests every time you build your code. If all of this sounds like fun...well...we need more people like you!

If you’re interested in applying for a Software Engineer in Test position, please apply for our general Software Engineer position, then indicate in your resume objective line that you’re interested in the SET role.

Over the past several months, hundreds of teams from all over the world have submitted stunning geo-models for our Google Model Your Town Competition. These examples of pure 3D civic pride are breathtaking to behold. Difficult as it was, the SketchUp team managed to pick six finalists, after which we asked the general public to vote for their favorite collection of models. Tens of thousands of you weighed in, and the talented team from the north of Spain were victorious. Zorionak! (That’s “Congratulations!” in Basque.)

The winning team is a dynamic duo: Josetxo Perez Fernandez, 36, is a professional who works in computer administration; and Pedro Domecq Aguirre, 45, is a programmer, 3D data specialist and network administrator. Those are their day jobs, anyway. It turns out that they’re actually world-class, polygon-wrangling, texture-mapping, megabyte-optimizing, geo-modeling superheroes. And now they’re bona fide local heroes, too. Thanks to them, millions of people across the globe can now get familiar with the beautiful little town of Getaria.

The beautiful coastline of Getaria

Not only that, but we’ll also be awarding US$25,000 to a local school and hosting a celebration with the town of Geteria in honor of Pedro's and Josetxo's accomplishment.

Getaria Lighthouse on Mount San Antón

Zorionak to the winning town, to the other five finalists, and to all the other entrants who collectively modeled almost 25,000 local landmarks that are now available for all to enjoy in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer. The virtual world is a richer place thanks to your efforts, and the real one is a lot better off, too.

As part of our commitment to diversity in computer science, since 2006, Google has partnered with the Hispanic College Fund (HCF) to provide scholarships for Hispanic students who are pursuing degrees in computer science and related fields.

Google HCF Scholars will receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2012-2013 school year and will be invited to attend the annual Google Scholars’ Retreat held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California this June.

Juan Alvarez Alanis, The University of Texas - Pan American

Rosangela Arlequin, Kean University

Guillermo Diaz, California State University - Sacramento

Lorenzo Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles

Raul Gutierrez, Stanford University

Angel Hernandez, University of California - Los Angeles

Jorge Horcasitas, Kettering University

Stephen Laplante, University of Washington - Seattle Campus

Tylor Louis, University of California - Los Angeles

Jose Navarro, Eastern Washington University

Oliver Nina, University of Central Florida

Laura Pina, University of California - San Diego

Daniel Rincon, University of Florida

Ivan Ruiz, University of California - Santa Cruz

Lesly Sandoval, Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus

Wendy Sepulveda, The University of Texas at Austin

Find out more about Google’s Scholarship Programs at http://www.google.com/jobs/scholarships.

We just wrapped up a three part Learning Series for the Google Online Marketing Challenge, via Google+ Hangouts On Air. Each broadcast highlighted the fundamentals of setting up successful AdWords campaigns, how to use the data to optimize your marketing efforts and gave tips on how to utilize Google+ for your businesses. For those who aren’t participating in this year’s Challenge, the videos are a good introduction as to what the competition is all about-- and maybe you’ll choose to rally a group of classmates together to participate next year!

Google SVA Scholars will receive a $10,000 academic scholarship for the 2012-2013 school year and will be invited to attend the annual Google Scholars’ Retreat held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA this June.

The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and we created the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004 to honor her memory. Anita’s legacy lives on today through this scholarship and the organization she created, which has since been re-named the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

This year we’d like to recognize and congratulate the 70 Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars and the 79 Google Anita Borg Memorial finalists, all of whom attend universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East or Africa. These students will attend the annual Google Scholars Retreat this summer, where they will have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, network with other scholars and participate in social activities. Students from the U.S. and Canada will attend the retreat in Mountain View, Calif., and students from Europe, the Middle East and Africa will attend the retreat in Zurich, Switzerland.

Here’s a full list of this year’s scholars and finalists along with the institutions they attend. In the coming months, we’ll also announce the recipients of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.